ABSTRACT
The chapter introduces and overviews the book. It provides background on the context out of which the Theorising Postgraduate Pedagogy (TPP) research programme emerged, as well as outlining the specific project that officially inaugurated it. It also discusses the present moment and the prevailing conditions of doctoral education and the university, in Australia and elsewhere. It thereby seeks to set up the book's positioning as effectively a history of the present and to provide a warrant for undertaking such an endeavour now, in very changed circumstances – bringing together an integrated set of essays previously published, now lightly revised, with essays original to this book. The former essays have never been assembled in this fashion, with some not easily assessed in their original form. The chapter concludes by proposing what is called the “post-auratic PhD”, as one possible way forward. The book overall is presented as a distinctive, historically significant account of doctoral supervision, the PhD, and the modern research university.
